Hypermobility 1NC
Thesis: Infrastructure social constructs time and space. Transportation policy designed to accelerate the pace and increase the scale of life produces a hypermobility for some but exclusion for the vast majority.
A. Infrastructure investments warp the construction of space and time to support economic and social hierarchies.
Graham 01 Professor @ Newcastle University (Stephen, 2001, Splintering Urbanism p.11-12)[Cepin]
Second, and following on from this, infrastructure networks, with their complex network architectures, work to bring heterogeneous places, people, buildings and urban elements into dynamic relationships and exchanges which would not otherwise be possible. Infrastructure networks provide the distribution grids and topological connections that link systems and practices of production with systems and practices of consumption. They unevenly bind spaces together across cities, regions, nations and international boundaries whilst helping also to define the material and social dynamics, and divisions, within and between urban spaces. Infrastructure networks interconnect (parts of) cities across global time zones and also mediate the multiple connections and disconnections within and between contemporary cities (Amin and Graham, 199 8b ). They dramatically, but highly unevenly, 'warp' and refashion the spaces and times of all aspects of interaction - social, economic, cultural, physical, ecological. Infrastructure networks are thus involved in sustaining what we might call 'sociotechnical geometries of power' in very real- but often very complex - ways (see Massey, 1993). They tend to embody 'congealed social interests' (Bijker, 1993). Through them people, organizations, institutions and firms are able to extend their influence in time and space beyond the 'here' and 'now'; they can, in effect, 'always be in a wide range of places' (Curry, 1998, 103). This applies whether users are 'visiting' web sites across the planet, telephoning a far-off friend or call centre, using distantly sourced energy or water resources, shifting their waste through pipes to far-off places, or physically moving their bodies across space on highways, streets or transport systems. The construction of spaces of mobility and flow for some, however, always involves the construction of barriers for others. Experiences of infrastructure are therefore highly contingent. 'For the person in the wheelchair, the stairs and door jamb in front of a building are not seamless sub tenders of use, but barriers. One person's infrastructure is another's difficulty' (Star, 1999, 380). Social biases have always been designed into urban infrastructure systems, whether intentionally or unintentionally. In ancient Rome, for example, the city's sophisticated water network was organized to deliver first to public fountains, then to public baths, and finally to individual dwellings, in the event of insufficient flow (Offner, 1999, 219). We must therefore recognize how the configurations of infrastructure networks are inevitably imbued with biased struggles for social, economic, ecological and political power to benefit from connecting with (more or less) distant times and places. At the same time, though, we need to be extremely wary of the dangers of assigning some simple causal or deterministic power to technology or infrastructure networksper se (Woolgar, 1991). Infrastructures and technologies do not have simple, definitive and universal urban 'impacts' in isolation. Rather, such large technological systems (Summerton, 1994a) or technical networks (Offner, 1993) are closely bound up within wider sociotechnical, political and cultural complexes which have contingent effects in different places and different times (see Tarr and Dupuy, 1988; Joerges, 1999a).
B. High-speed travel necessitates social inequality that privileges the time-rich, affluent citizen.
HARRIS, LEWIS, & ADAM 04 1. Peter Harris, 2. James Lewis, 3. Barbara Adam, Emerita Professor of the Social Sciences at Cardiff University, founder-editor of the international journal Time & Society, Ph.D. in Sociology and DsCEcon from Cardiff University. (Harris, Lewis, and Adam: “Time, Sustainable Transport and the Politics of Speed”, World Transport Policy & Practice, Vol. 10 No. 2, 2004
p. 7-8
This section examines how the previously identified implicit, taken-for-granted temporal assumptions within transport can affect societal groups differently andin doing socause temporal inequity amongst them.To do this we shall examine groups that are defined by age, gender and geographical location. Current trends show that the over-sixty population of the EU-15 has grown at an average of 1.3% per annum over the last thirty years, with the Accession Countries showing a similar rate of increase (Eurostat, 2002). Similarly, life expectancy at sixty-five is also increasing for both men and women (Eurostat, 2002). This means that the European population has aged and is likely to continue aging in the future. This aging society will lead to a rise in both retirees and economically active elderly people in Europe. The mobility needs of both these groups have, and are continuing to have, a significant impact on the transport system. Once people retire they become time-rich, which means that they have a lot of time at their disposal. To utilise and enjoy this ‘discretionary time’ often requires mobility, which means that this group will need to use either privately-owned cars orbe dependent on the public transport systemfor their day- to-day social and leisure activities. Meanwhile, those who work for a longer period in their lives are time- poor, meaning that they have little discretionary time due to their work commitments. This group also requires the full range of the transport system in order to fulfill its employment commitments. Consequently, both of these groups require the transport system for a longer period of their lives than was previously the norm. With advancing age tends to come reduced physical mobility and therefore an increased reliance on both public and private transport for short distance journeys. However, the current transport system isunderpinned by high-speed principles, and is thereforebiased to best serve those who require high-speed transport over longer distances. Timetables and schedules that enforce this pace are predominantly geared towards the temporal needs of the middle-aged(i.e. 18–65 age group) who largely work the five-day week. This pace can alienate those who, for whatever reason, live and operate at a slower pace, be it as a result of lifestyle, age, illness or immobility.Thus, those on the margins of these groups, such as the elderly, sick or disabled, who live at a different pace from those who work in gainful employment tend to be poorly served by current transport policy. This temporal inequity within transport has yet to be fully acknowledged in policy. While these societal groups are not completely isolated or marginalised by our transport network, it is their specific temporal needs, implicit in their way of life, which, if considered, might provide a more equitable service. There are other inequities that can be seen as a direct result of the valorisation of high-speed. Increased velocity in transport requires more time to build up and longer to slow down. Thus, for example, for high-speed rail, stopping and starting becomes inefficient, meaning that high-speed rail routes have fewer stops than services operating at a slower pace. Likewise, motorways have fewer junctions than the smaller roads that carry the slower local traffic. To further maximise time-savings, high-speed infrastructure is tied to the shortest and most direct/straight path between two points. This means communities who are distant from high-speed corridors as well as those who are not close to stopping points along these corridors are at a disadvantagewhen using public services for both long and short journeys.People who do not want to embrace high- speed transport, such as those car-users who do not want to drive on motorways, are also disadvantaged by this systemthat prioritises high speed. Again this is another way in whichthe valorisation of high speed has caused a temporal blind spot in current mainstream transport policy, where users who do not fit into the standardised temporal regime are being disadvantaged. A final equity issue tied to speed and transport relates to the different mobility patterns of men and women with families. Temporal structures for women frequently differ from those of men because of the larger amount of household and care work that they undertake (Belloni, 1998, 250). This extensive range of tasks leads to a trip and travel schedule where many activities are fulfilled in one outing, leading to ‘trip chaining’ as opposed to the single purpose, direct trips that tend to characterise the mobility requirements of men in employment, (Turner and Grieco, 2000, 130). ‘Trip chaining’ requires a public transport system that is aware of the temporal needs of its female users, a need that is not catered for by current policy regarding transport routes and scheduling (Turner and Grieco, 2000, 130). The current public transport service is shaped towards direct, single-purpose trips with single destinations, which means that women who try to fulfill a number of tasks have to follow an extensive round trip of different services that may take up a long period of time.This necessity to combine a number of different mobility requirements whilst using public transport can create time poverty in women’s lives, which can prevent them from carrying out their required daily activities. It would seem unfortunate that in a transport system biased towards speed valorisation the lack of synchronisation between services means more time is lost for people dependent on combinations of transport provisions. The three areas identified above are marked by a temporal inequity between social groups. Those who are time-poor/money-rich and who tend to operate within the dominant timescapes of Western society have a higher mobility choice than those who are time-rich/money-poor. This is becausethe time-poor can exchange their money for time by buying speed and thereby save time whilst the money-poor tend not to be able to exchange their surplus time for money and must use slower forms of mobility. Thusthe current transport system is organised to the time of the clock which tends to suit the middle-aged, affluent, weekday worker.Given this neglect of the transport needs of a wide range of social groups it is not surprising that many people prefer their own private transport to the inequitable public provision.
C. Infrastructure investment produces spatial inequality.
Graham 01 Professor @ Newcastle University (Stephen, 2001, Splintering Urbanism)[Cepin]
Above all, the increasingly 'hybrid' nature of contemporary cities, where powerful digital connections elsewhere articulate every aspect of urban life, requires us continually to rethink the paradigms that we use when analysing cities. Such processes 'challenge the long-held privileged status of Cartesian geometry, the map, and the matrix or grid. Infrastructural links and connectors, as well as information exchanges and thresholds, become the dominant metaphors to examine the boundless extension of the regional city' (Boyer, 2000, 75). Increasingly, as Manuel Castells (1996, 1997a, 1998) suggests, these processes are directly supporting the emergence of an internationally integrated and increasingly urbanised, and yet highly fragmented, network societythat straddles the planet. New, highly polarised urban landscapes are emerging where 'premium' infrastructure networks - high-speed telecommunications, 'smart' highways, global airline networks - selectively connect together the most favoured users and places, both within and between cities. Valued spaces are thus increasingly defined by their fast-track connections elsewhere, as any examination of the intensifying transport, telecommunications and energy links between the dominant parts of 'global' cities reveals. At the same time, however, premium and high-capability networked infrastructures often effectively bypass less favoured and intervening places and what Castells calls 'redundant' users. Often such bypassing and disconnection are directly embedded into the design of networks, both in terms of the geographies of the points they do and do not connect, and in terms of the control placed on who or what can flow over the networks. Through such processes, Castells predicts that: The global economy will expand in the twenty-first century, using substantial increases in the power of telecommunications and information processing. It will penetrate all countries, all territories, all cultures, all communication flows, and all financial networks, relentlessly scanning the planet for new opportunities of profit-making. But it will do so selectively, linking valuable segments and discarding used up, or irrelevant, locales and people. The territorial unevenness of production will result in an extraordinary geography of differential value making that will sharply contrast countries, regions, and metropolitan areas. Valuable locales and people will be found everywhere, even in Sub-Saharan Mrica. But switched-off territories and people will also be found everywhere, albeit in different proportions. The planet is being segmented into clearly distinct spaces, defined by different time regimes. [14-15]
D. Hierarchical mobility is unethical – our freedom to move is a form of escapism that discourages us from caring for others. The aff treats unproductive others as disposable.
Manderscheid 9 [Kate, Master's degree in sociology, politics and scientific innovators and contemporary history at the Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg Ph.D. in 2004 with a space for sociological work Tubingen South Development also attended the University of Freiburg; “Integrating Space and Mobilities into the Analysis of Social Inequality”; Distinktion No. 18 · 2009: 7–27; Ebsco; Boyce]
People who move and act faster, who come nearest to the momentariness of movement, are now the people who rule. And it is the people who cannot move as quickly, and more conspicuously yet the category of people who cannot at will leave their place at all, who are ruled. Domination consists in one’s own capacity to escape, to disengage, to ‘be elsewhere’, and the right to decide the speed with which all that is done – while simultaneously stripping the people on the dominated side of their ability to arrest or constrain their moves or slow them down. (Bauman, 2000: 120) This means that the capacity to be mobile seems be stratified and functions also as a stratifying force. Yet, as Bauman suggests in the quotation above, and as, amongst others, Weiss (2005) demonstrates, occupying a powerful positionality within social space does not necessarily come along with a high degree of corporeal mobility but rather with a high degree of ‘spatial autonomy’ (Weiss, 2005: 714). Since social spaces are fields of power relations, thepower or capitals of these positionalities allow some individuals to move information, goods and people to one’s own place, that is, to make others move.14 On the other extreme of social stratification there are positionalities to be found, characterized by sparse resources and very little mobility capacity (cf. Castells, 2005: 48; Weiss, 2005: 715–16). Concerning geographic space, as Urry (2007a: 187) points out, it is the notion of ‘“access” to activities, values and goods’ which was the main way in which mobilities have entered the debate of social stratification and inequality. Yet, not only does the access or appropriation of resources entail mobilities, but mobilities themselves rest upon certain premises not equally disposable. However, as Urry (2007a: 192) and Cass, Shove and Urry (2005: 543 ff.) argue, although mobilities are crucial forces of stratification, social inequality cannot be reduced merely by improving access to the means of mobilities. What is at stake are the activities, values and goods to which mobilities allow access (Urry, 2007a: 187): I call this network capital to bring out that the underlying mobilities themselves do nothing. What are key are the social consequences of such mobilities, namely, to be able to engender and sustain social relations with those people (and to visit specific places) who are mostly not physically proximate, that is, to form and sustain networks. So network capital points to the real and potential social relations that mobilities afford. This formulation is somewhat akin to Marx in Capital where he focuses upon the social relations of capitalist production and not only upon the forces of production per se. My analogous argument is that it is necessary to examine the social relations that the means of mobility afford and not only the changing form taken by the forces of mobility. (Urry, 2007a: 196; emphasis in original)
E. This unethical production of disposable life is a political evil that must be rejected.
Patrick HAYDEN Senior Lecturer IR @ St. Andrews ‘7 “Superfluous Humanity: An Arendtian Perspective on the Political Evil of Global Poverty” Millennium 35 (2) p. 289-290
Much like Arendt, Bauman argues that modernity is characterised by instrumental rationality and a drive towards bureaucracy and technological order, with a resulting emptying out of moral responsibility. The era of neoliberal globalisation, Bauman contends, exposes how the project of modernity - or more accurately, of compulsive modernisation - necessarily produces ‘human waste’.52 Here threehistorical strands of modernisation converge: order-building, economic progress, and capitalist globalisation. For Bauman the modernisation process is defined by the drive to design, engineer and administer society, most fundamentally in terms of the ‘freedom’ to consume. The corollary of this process is that whatever cannot be assimilated into the model of modernisation (or ‘development’) as consumption must be treated as unfit, undesirable, redundant, useless, and disposable. Immigrants, refugees, and the impoverished are simply superfluous populations who, if they cannot be directly eliminated in the ‘post-totalitarian’ era, at least can be made to disappear from our consciousness. In Bauman’s words,we ‘dispose of leftovers in the most radical and effective way: we make them invisible by not looking and unthinkable by not thinking. They worry us only when the routine elementary defences are broken and the precautions fail.’53 The wasted lives of human refuse are stripped of dignity, driven to the furthest margins of society, and eradicated from public space while hidden in plain sight. Bauman’s argument, couched in language that evokes the parallels drawn by Arendt between totalitarian systems and the basic conditions of modern capitalist society, lends support to the central claim of this article: that global poverty ‘erases’ the global poor, excludes them from recognition as fellow human beings, and denies them standing as equals within a shared public world. Simply put, global poverty makes a vast portion of humanity superfluous. The global poor have become, to borrow Arendt’s phrase for those deprived of their human rights, ‘the scum of the earth’, because of who they are (or where they are born) rather than what they have done.54 As Dana Villa asserts, in today’s world ‘untold millions will have to suffer the crushing fate of being no use to the world economy’.55 Along these lines, Thomas Pogge has proposed that extreme global poverty may constitute ‘the largest crime against humanity ever committed, the death toll of which exceeds, every week, that of the recent tsunami and, every three years, that of World War II, the concentration camps and gulags included’.56